HA

I have already written about the use of Connection Manager 11.2 to govern access to a database. While researching this piece I have updated the original post so that it’s relevant for 12c as well.

Although the idea of using Connection Manager is tempting, the obvious first question is about high availability of the process, you don’t want it to become a Single Point of Failure (SPOF). After all, if the gatekeeper to your database environment fails, you are effectively closed for business. One option would be to add another CMAN process that could be used.

Lab Setup

I have created a few VMs to simulate the scenario. I installed CMAN in 2 VMs running Oracle Linux 7 and CMAN 12c. The client homes have been patched up to the April PSU because that’s considered good practice (although I couldn’t find a reference to CMAN in the OPatch logs). The hosts are named oracledev and server4.

As human beings, we are sometimes make mistakes. How do you make sure that your employees won’t make mistakes and cause downtime/data loss/etc on your critical production systems?

I don’t think we can avoid this technically, probably working procedures is the solution.
I’d like to hear your thoughts.

I typed my thoughts and as I was finishing, I thought that it makes sense to post it on the blog too so here we go…

The keys to prevent mistakes are low stress levels, clear communications and established processes. Not a complete list but I think these are the top things to reduce the number of mistakes we make managing data infrastructure or for that matter working in any critical environment be it IT administration, aviation engineering or medical surgery field. It’s also a matter of personality fit – depending on your balance between mistakes tolerance and agility required, you will favor hiring one individual or another.
Regardless of how much you try, there are still going to be human errors and you have to account for them in the infrastructure design and processes. The real disasters happen when many things align like several failure combined with few human mistakes. The challenge is to find the right balance between efforts invested in making no mistakes and efforts invested into making your environment errors-proof to the point when risk or human mistake is acceptable to the business.

Those are the general ideas.

Just a few examples of the practical solutions to prevent mistakes when it comes to Oracle DBA:

test production actions on a test system before applying in production

have a policy to review every production change by another senior member of a team

watch over my shoulder policy working on production environments – i.e. second pair of eye all the time

employee training, database recovery bootcamp

discipline of performing routing work under non-privileged accounts

Some of the items to limit impact of the mistakes:

multiples database controlfiles for Oracle database (in case DBA manually does something bad to one of them – I saw this happen)